Just a Memo

Detect Operating System with JavaScript

Here’s a snip­pet of JS code that might come in handy if you, let’s say, would like to fil­ter out what type of con­tent to dis­play depend­ing on your web­site user’s OS. A real-life exam­ple would be hav­ing a down­load link show up to user’s who have a client that was only pub­lished on Win­dows.

// This script sets OSName variable as follows:
// "Windows" for all versions of Windows
// "MacOS" for all versions of Macintosh OS
// "Linux" for all versions of Linux
// "UNIX" for all other UNIX flavors
// "Unknown OS" indicates failure to detect the OS
var OSName="Unknown OS";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Win")!=-1) OSName="Windows";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Mac")!=-1) OSName="MacOS";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("X11")!=-1) OSName="UNIX";
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("Linux")!=-1) OSName="Linux";
document.write('Your OS: '+OSName);